Page 73 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"My point stands. Tomorrow these earn their price tag." Luca closed the case with a soft click and looked between the two of us, something almost gentle underneath the usual dry delivery. "Get some rest, both of you. Whatever's left of tonight, you should not spend all of it staring at a floor plan you have already memorized twice over."

They left within a few minutes of each other, Nik with a final look at the timeline like he could not quite make himself stop reading it, Luca with a short nod that somehow carried more weight than a longer goodbye would have. Silence settled over the room the moment the door shut behind them, every map and marked-up page still exactly where we had left them, waiting for tomorrow to arrive and make use of all this planning or prove it had never been enough to begin with.

Cora stayed. She always stayed now.

"You've gone quiet," she said, echoing a line I had said to her once, a lifetime ago, in a kitchen that felt like it belonged to different people entirely.

"I'm thinking."

"About the plan?"

"About you, within reach of a man I know for certain wants to hurt the people I care about." I sat down across from her, the table between us covered in everything we had built to keep her safe and nothing that could actually guarantee it would work. "I have run this exact scenario a hundred times in my head over four days, every version of tomorrow night, every place it could go wrong, and I keep arriving at the same problem. I cannot control this one. Not the way I have controlled every other threat in twenty years of doing this."

"You don't have to control it. You have to survive it with the rest of us. Those aren't the same job."

"I am aware they are not the same job. I am considerably less certain I know how to do the second one." I let the quiet stretch out between us, something I had spent my whole life avoiding in front of anyone who mattered. "I am afraid, Cora. Not cautious. Not careful. Afraid, in a way I have never once let myself be since I was young enough that fear still felt like the only honest thing available to me."

She did not reach for me right away, and I was grateful for that, because I needed the sentence to finish landing before either of us moved past it. Her hand stayed still on the table between us, not pulling back, just waiting, the same patience she had shown me the night she knocked on a door with no guarantee it would open, instead of turning back toward home.

"Say that again," she said quietly. "Not because I didn't hear you. Because I don't think you've ever said it to me in exactly those words before, and I want to know what it costs you to say it twice."

"I am afraid." The second time came easier than the first, though not by much. "I am afraid of tomorrow night in a way no plan on this table accounts for, because every plan on this table assumes I can think clearly the entire time you are somewhere I cannot immediately reach."

"You can think clearly. I'll be exactly where the plan puts me, doing exactly what I'm good at, and you'll know it, in real time, because that's the whole point of the last four days." She reached across the table then, covering my hand with hers, steady, and I understood only then how badly I had needed exactly that. "I need you thinking clearly tomorrow more than I need you brave. Bravery gets people killed. Clear thinking gets everyone home."

"That is uncomfortably practical advice for one in the morning."

"I contain multitudes. Also, I've had four days to think of nothing else, which gave me plenty of time to refine the delivery." A small, tired smile crossed her face, gone as quickly as it came. "I'm not going anywhere tomorrow, Dmitri. Not recklessly into the danger, and not away from it out of fear either. I'm going to be exactly where I said I'd be, doing exactly what we planned, and I need the same thing from you. Steady. Not fearless. Just steady."

I turned my hand over beneath hers until our fingers laced together, and for a long stretch neither of us reached for another word, the city beyond the window carrying on the way it always had, oblivious to the two people inside quietly agreeing, without a single sentence spoken out loud, that they intended to survive the next twenty-four hours together or not at all.

"Tomorrow," I said, and for once my voice wasn't quiet because I was controlled. It was quiet because I was afraid, and she was the only person alive I'd ever let hear the difference.

40

CORA

The Ambrose let me in before the sun did, and for the first hour it was just me, a security guard named Pete who had stopped asking why I always arrived first, and four hundred empty chairs waiting to become someone else's best night. I stood at the center of the empty ballroom floor, clipboard against my chest, and let myself have exactly sixty seconds of doing nothing but looking, because in a few hours this room would belong to caterers and guests and a version of tonight I could plan for but never fully control, and right now, for just a minute, it was still entirely mine.

I thought, standing there, about the woman who had walked into a stranger's engagement party with a borrowed clipboard and no idea what her own name badge should say. That woman would not have recognized this one, the one who could stand in the center of a four-hundred-guest gala for the most dangerous family in Chicago and feel, underneath everything else, almost calm. Walsh Events had been three vendors and a prayer when I started it. It was this room now, gold light and white flowers and a plan so precise it had its own second, secret purpose folded quietly inside the first. I had built both versions of myself the same way, one impossible week at a time, refusing to let either one fall apart in front of witnesses, and for one full minute I let that be the only thing I thought about.

Then the trucks started arriving, and mine turned into everyone's.

Florals came first, forty-one arrangements of white ranunculus and eucalyptus that Beckett had fought Naomi to the death over three weeks ago, and watching them go up along the head table felt like watching a sentence I had written finally get read out loud correctly. The lighting crew rigged the up-lights along the east wall exactly the way I had drawn them on a napkin at two in the morning, warm gold instead of the sterile white the venue had suggested, and when Marcus flipped the test switch the whole room changed color the way a held breath changes a chest. Linens went on. Chargers went down. A hundred tiny decisions I had made months ago, back when this was still a spreadsheet instead of a room, kept arriving on trucks and becoming real, one crate at a time. Somewhere around ten a florist's assistant asked me, entirely sincerely, whether I wanted the head table arrangements a half inch taller, and I answered without even having to think about it, which told me more clearly than anything else could have that I actually knew what I was doing today.

"It's actually happening?" Naomi said, standing beside me somewhere around noon, both of us staring at the head table like it might disappear if we blinked. "After everything, it's really happening."

"Don't jinx it."

"I'm not jinxing it. I'm marveling. There's a difference." She reached out and straightened a runner that did not need straightening, the same nervous tell she'd had since her first event with me, back when she still thought perfection was achievable instead of merely aimed for. "This is the best room we've ever built, Cora. I mean that. Whatever else is happening today, this room is genuinely the best thing either of us has ever made."

I did not tell her what else was happening today. I had gotten very good, over the last week, at holding two entirely separate conversations in my head at once, one about seating charts and one about loading docks, and letting only the first one out where people could hear it.

My phone buzzed in my back pocket. Dmitri's text read: "East dock is secure, the badge check is running clean so far, and the room looks beautiful in the photo Nik sent me." I did not ask which photo, or when Nik had taken it, or how many of my own people had been quietly photographed today without knowing it. I typed back a single word, good, and put the phone away before Naomi could ask who I was smiling at, because some things I still got to keep just for myself, even today.

"Where's Beckett?" I asked instead.

"Dealing with something. He told me not to worry about it, which is either extremely reassuring or the single most alarming sentence he's said to me all year."